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Photographies

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Clinton Road: 40 years on

Ian Walker

To cite this article: Ian Walker (2017) Clinton Road: 40 years on, Photographies, 10:1, 65-90,DOI: 10.1080/17540763.2016.1259177

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2016.1259177

Published online: 19 Jan 2017.

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Ian Walker

CLINTON ROAD

40 years on

This essay is centred on one photograph of Clinton Road, London, taken in 1977 by theGerman artist/photographer Thomas Struth. It is in three parts, each of which takes adifferent approach to the discussion of the photograph. These parts are not intended tobuild into a single, unifying argument but rather work off and indeed against each otherto suggest that any one approach is inevitably incomplete. Intersecting with this, there isalso a deliberate shift between contrasting modes of address, speaking in different waysabout the image and the place. The first part provides a close reading of the photographand what it tells us about the street at that point in time. It also includes an account ofthe publication history of the image. Part two picks up on the overall title given by Struthto his urban photography — “Unconscious Places” — and asks what that phrase canmean. A variety of theoretical frameworks are used to explore this: the development ofperspective, the Lacanian gaze, surrealist urbanism and the uncanny. Finally, the thirdpart returns us to the geographical location of Clinton Road itself, in both its historicaldevelopment and its present day existence.

Part one: the picture

In the winter of 2014–15, the Barbican Art Gallery in London staged the exhibitionConstructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age. It was a very large show,featuring important work made all around the globe. But one fact was striking. There wasonly one photograph in the exhibition taken in London itself: Clinton Road, London, 1977 bythe German artist/photographer Thomas Struth (Figure 1).1

Struth is now internationally recognised and his work has been widely exhibited,published and discussed. But he was just 23 years old when he made this photographand still a student at the Düsseldorf Academy. He had earlier studied painting underGerhard Richter and then, in 1976, transferred to photography with Bernd Becher.(Later, in critical shorthand, he would be bundled together with fellow Becherstudents such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff and Candida Höfer as the“Düsseldorf School”.)

Struth had first adopted the strategy used in the Clinton Road photograph for a studentexhibition in February 1976, when he had shown a grid of photographs of ordinary, emptystreets in Düsseldorf, all photographed looking down the middle of the street. “I liked the

Photographies, 2017Vol. 10, No. 1, 65–90, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17540763.2016.1259177© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

central perspective because it was more conceptual”, he later said, “Anti-compositional, in away” (Prince 1–2). Those early photos were made with a 35 mm camera, but after Struthjoined Becher’s class later that year, he graduated to a large tripod-mounted camera whichgave a 13 × 18 cm negative. With this, he made more than 300 photographs of Düsseldorfstreets between summer 1976 and summer 1977.

The earlier Düsseldorf pictures came out of a conceptualist rationale, related forexample to Richter’s archival approach; around this time, Struth also assisted Richterin putting together a major exhibition of the Atlas project. But Bernd Becher and hiswife Hilla would have introduced Struth and his fellow students to the photographictradition to which their own work has usually been related: the “Neue Sachlichkeit” or“New Objectivity” photography of the 1920s, emphasising order, control and the“objectivity” of the camera.2

Struth came to London in the spring of 1977 with fellow student Axel Hütte tophotograph working class housing in the East End. They intended to document therange of buildings from Victorian terraces to modernist estates, with Hütte concen-trating on entrances and hallways while Struth made photographs of street perspec-tives. They stayed for three months. Hütte would return in 1982–84 on a DAADscholarship to photograph housing blocks with a large format camera and, in 1993, hepublished in Germany a handsome volume of that London work (Hütte; see also Pardoand Parr 230–39). But, though Struth must presumably have made a number of imagesduring his 1977 stay, the photograph of Clinton Road is, as far as I know, the onlypicture from the East End project that he has exhibited and published.

Fig. 1 Thomas Struth, Clinton Road, London 1977, silver gelatin print, 44 × 66 cms in 66 × 84 cm frame, © Thomas Struth.

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I will return to how Clinton Road, London, 1977 would be contextualised withinStruth’s oeuvre and what meanings the photograph accrued through that placement. ButI want to begin with the picture as I experienced it at the Barbican in December 2014.In the gallery bookshop, I bought a postcard of Struth’s photograph, and holding thisnext to the framed print on the gallery wall made me very aware of how much moreinformation was visible in the print; though small by the standards of Struth’s laterwork, there were details there that were invisible in the reproduction.3 So I began aslow and careful scouring of the exhibition print to build up a sense of what exactlythis picture shows us of that street at that point in time.

Two features of the photograph are immediately obvious. One is the absolute precisionof the perspective of the street, composing the picture as symmetrical and ordered. It is thefeature which connects the picture back to the work of the Bechers, which also emphasisesfrontality and symmetry, albeit usually centred on a physically dominant structure ratherthan, as in Struth’s picture, a space between structures. The other feature in common withthe Bechers’work is an absence of people; in the Bechers’ pictures of factories, there are noworkers, in Struth’s images of city streets, no inhabitants. The emptiness is palpable, partlybecause it is not inevitable. In the distance, at the point where the perspective converges,there is a railway line (the track itself is behind some vegetation, but we can see thepowerlines above it). Struth could have clicked his shutter when a train passed (as AndréKertész had done at Meudon). Or he could have photographed while children were playingin the street (as Roger Mayne or Robert Doisneau or Helen Levitt would have done). Hedid neither— he chose a moment when the scene was empty and apparently silent.

However, there is one thing which is moving. On the second house in from theleft is some sort of banner or flag, rendered blurred and indecipherable by the longexposure of the photograph. This tells us that Struth is working with a tripod, set upapparently in the middle of the street, and also that there is a wind blowing, whichrather belies the air of stillness in the picture. But otherwise Struth has chosen tophotograph on a day with flat, dull light (something else his early pictures shared withthe work of the Bechers). There is no indication which direction we are looking in orwhat time of day it is. It has rained recently, as we can see from the puddles in thegutter in the bottom right corner, but everywhere else the ground has dried up.

I’ll come back to the flag or whatever it is, but that house has another featuresetting it apart. The curtain in the window has been hitched up to show the blacknesswithin. Has this just happened? Is someone in there watching the photographer atwork? (And is it just a coincidence that this house has a scooter outside, associated withyouth rebellion ever since the Mods rode them in the 1960s?)

Other than the raised curtain, we have no access to the life being lived inside thehouses. What would those dwellings have contained in 1977? Above the facades, thereare television aerials and phone lines and most of the inhabitants would have possesseda TV and one fixed phone, the latter probably sitting in the hallway. They would havehad a cooker and a (small) fridge, but probably not a washing machine. They would,on the whole, not yet have central heating — in my memory that starts to be installedin such working class homes in the 1980s. So heating would be from gas or electricfires and hot water would be provided by a boiler.

My attention is drawn to the cars lining the street. A detail lost in the postcard butlegible in the bigger print on the gallery wall are the registration numbers of the two

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cars at the front: AKM 247K on the left and TCU 350L on the right. Some internetresearch reveals that the car on the left was first registered in 1972 in Kent and the caron the right in 1973 up on Tyneside. So, as we might expect, the cars aren’t new —about four or five years old and maybe on their second owner — and both havetravelled to be here. Behind those cars, there are 12 others, two of which are blacktaxi cabs. This is a time of day when their drivers aren’t out at work.

In the catalogue for the Barbican show, the text on Struth was written by OwenHatherly, whomade a brief comment on this picture: “The street is Victorian, but it looks asif the war has only just ended” (Pardo and Redstone 139). It seems as if not a lot had changedin the fabric of London between the 1940s and the 1970s, and the city was still pervaded bya grey pall of disintegration. But there are different sorts of disintegration, different speeds.During the Blitz of 1940–41, parts of the city experienced instantaneous destruction.Looking at Struth’s photo, I am reminded of Graham Sutherland’s painting of a street in theEast End after it has been bombed in 1941 (Figure 2). It also exploits a strong centralperspective and an atmospheric emptiness to give an eerie feeling to the place. But the sceneis surrounded by a heavy darkness quite unlike the grey daylight of Struth’s photograph,which details a much slower, almost glacial, process of disintegration and dissolution.

Peering beyond the rows of houses on Clinton Road, one’s eye comes up against aconcrete wall with corrugated fencing on either side. The street seems to be a deadend with no way out. This chimes with a general sense of desolation evident in thefacades of the houses themselves, which are pretty knocked about, with a lot of flakingpaint and patched up plaster visible. There are weeds growing on the edge of thepavement, rubbish in the gutters and, over by the wall on the extreme right, a littlepile of dog shit. None of this looks good.

Fig. 2 Graham Sutherland, Devastation, 1941: An East End Street, 1941, crayon, gouache, ink, graphite and water-

colour on paper mounted on hardboard, 64.8 × 110.4 cms. © Tate, London 2016.

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Yet it’s worth noting that there are none of the more extreme signifiers ofdesolation which marked a lot of London photography and film of the period. Thereis no graffiti and the cars are not burnt out wrecks. There could be a wasteland full ofdetritus nearby or a decaying concrete tower block looming over the scene, but if so,they are determinedly kept out of shot. The intimations of dissolution in Struth’sphotograph are much more low-key; Clinton Road is quietly mouldering and theweeds and the humans seem to live in peaceful co-existence. As Pink Floyd intonedjust four years before Struth came to London: “Hanging on in quiet desperation is theEnglish way” (Pink Floyd), and one can bet that somewhere in one of those houses is acopy of The Dark Side of the Moon, to be listened to on empty, grey days like this.4

The 1970s are remembered as a dark decade, full of winters of discontent, three-day weeks and financial crises. 1977, in particular — the year in which Struth took thispicture — has its own mythic resonance. It was the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubileeand Clinton Road was just the sort of street that, on 7 June, would have hosted a partylike the ones photographed by Martin Parr in Yorkshire.5 But 1977 and the reactionagainst the Jubilee was also of course the most public high point of Punk, when the SexPistols topped the charts with “God Save the Queen”. Punk was not only a revoltagainst the likes of Pink Floyd, it was also a protest about the stagnant state of Britishpolitics, culture and life more generally.

So the fabric blowing in the wind might be a bit of bunting or a Union Jack leftover from the Jubilee, but it might also be a banner proclaiming “Anarchy in the UK”.And those alternatives could also make us wonder what sort of people lived in ClintonRoad in the 1970s. Were they salt-of-the-earth working class taxi drivers who ownedtheir own houses? Or were the houses already broken up into bedsits, occupied by theunemployed and disaffected, anarchist rebels, artists even. Probably, like many streetsin London, it was a mixture of both (and more besides).

If I had walked down Clinton Road in 1977, I would probably have considered it anormal, typical sort of street and would not have paused there very long. I think thatStruth also saw it as typical and normal, but in a quite different way, one that did makehim pause. For me, this street would have been familiar because I have walked streetslike this since I was a child, not only in London, but also in the industrial cities of theNorth, the Midlands and South Wales. Struth, though, was a visitor from anotherculture, and this photograph takes its place in between the pictures he had made in hisown home city of Düsseldorf and those he would go on to make on the exotic, indeedmythic, “mean streets” of New York. It was perhaps the very sense of unfamiliaritywith someone else’s normality that made him set up his tripod, take this picture and,without betraying the banality of the street, also transform it into something memor-able, extraordinary and even (if it’s not too grand a word) archetypal.

The picture of Clinton Road was not one that Struth did anything with straightaway. After his time in London, in the autumn of 1977, Struth was awarded ascholarship to spend time in New York and it was there that he further developedthe photographic strategy we see initiated in his 1976–77 Düsseldorf pictures andcontinued in his photograph of Clinton Road. He subsequently photographed in muchthe same way in Paris, Edinburgh, Charleroi, Berlin and Rome and it was this body ofwork which made his reputation in the 1980s.6

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In 1987, Struth exhibited these pictures at the Kunsthaus in Bern under a new overalltitle, Unconscious Places (Unbewusste Orte; see also Loock). But at that point, the body ofwork began with the pictures of New York. Only later would Clinton Road, London, 1977emerge and take its place in Struth’s oeuvre. The earliest place I can find it is in the catalogueStrassen, published to coincide with an exhibition in Bonn in 1995 (46). There, it is the fifthimage in, followed two pages later by another London picture: an image of Shoe Lane inthe City of London, passing under the Holborn Viaduct. (This seems to be the onlyappearance of this second image, which, both in terms of subject-matter and camerapositioning, has quite a different feel to Clinton Road.)

Clinton Road, London, 1977 re-appeared in the catalogue for Struth’s major mid-career retrospective which was shown in four major American museums in 2002 (ThomasStruth 1977–2002 25).7 And, in 2012, Clinton Road was the first image in a newpublication of Unconscious Places, with an essay by Richard Sennett, which presented amuch expanded body of work, moving significantly away from the rigorous parameterswith which the project began (Unconscious Places 4). Where the early pictures are blackand white, printed to a modest size, centred on the perspectival line down the middle ofa street, mostly unpeopled and photographed in either Europe or the USA, the laterpictures move into colour, are printed on a much larger scale, often photographed fromhigh windows or rooftops. Even when the scene is at street level, the view is usuallyoblique and sometimes filled with a great many people. Moreover, this has now becomea global project, with the later images depicting the cities of Asia and South America.

Yet, despite this diversity, there is one continuing common thread: all these spacesare public, urban and vernacular, chosen from myriad possibilities. The overarchingtitle Unconscious Places, first used in 1987 to describe Struth’s early urban photographs,is still operative in 2012 to cover a much expanded body of images, and it is worthpausing at this point to consider the implications of that term and in what ways itframes our understanding, both of Struth’s pictures and of the places they depict.

Part two: some theory

The title Unconscious Places might at first seem rather perplexing. Surely the introduc-tion of that unstable concept, the “unconscious”, is at odds with the materialist “NewObjectivity” ethos with which it seemed natural to associate Struth’s early urbanpictures. Whose or what “unconscious” does this title refer to?

Is it that of the viewer, a suggestion that these are places we connect with, not directlyand overtly, but through subliminal impulses residing beneath our conscious understand-ing? Or is it the “unconscious” of the camera, revealing things we might not see with ournaked eye and allowing us to scrutinise them. (A connection might be made here with theparadoxical “optical unconscious” proposed by Walter Benjamin, one of the writers whoparticularly affected the young Struth (Walker 172–3).) Is it the collective unconscious ofthe people who live in these places, people who, even though we do not see them in thepictures, still invest these places with the complex web of intentions and emotions whichgo to make up the everyday? Or is it the other way round— that the streets themselvesinfluence the thoughts and feelings of their inhabitants?

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To take this further, might not the place itself have its own “unconscious”? Afterall, cities are made by people with their desires and traumas, so why should not thosesame emotions — both conscious and unconscious — be embedded in the place itself?And if grand boulevards and civic buildings are the city’s most self-conscious pre-sentation of itself, then the housing blocks and working districts photographed byStruth can be considered the city’s unconscious, where the formal, official façade slipsand things that are otherwise repressed are revealed.

In 1974, three years before Struth came to London, Jonathan Raban had publishedhis influential book Soft City, in which he evoked the many ways in which the humanpsyche negotiated the urban environment:

The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, isas real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics,in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture. (10)

The cities in Struth’s photographs are self-evidently hard cities, made of tarmac, brick,concrete and steel, and pictured by a machine. But, by introducing the “soft” concept of theunconscious into his title, he perhaps suggests that the hardness and the softness are connectedand can hardly be separated, that the one cannot exist without the other. As Struth remarked,“architecture and the space it creates have to be read in relationship to the human body andmental condition” (Unconscious Places 51). And that, while the urban environment is plannedand designed, “still there is something else, a general atmosphere, and I was fascinated by thatquestion of what is the common, unconscious energy” (Prince 2).

AsMichael Fried noted, most of Struth’s early pictures— those he took in Düsseldorf orNew York—“convey the impression that each place or milieu as a whole was never intendedby anyone to be precisely what it strikes the viewer of the photograph as being” (277). Theyhave been created over time and reveal “the collaging together of traces of multipleintentions”. But the Clinton Road photograph is an anomaly in this respect. What is moststriking on this street is not diversity but uniformity. The houses were built all at the sametime, to the same design, and march down either side of the street in strict regularity.

Let us return then to those two striking qualities of this photograph: its composi-tion around a symmetrical central perspective and its absolute emptiness. These wereelements earlier identified with the “Neue Sachlichkeit” aesthetic of Struth’s photo-graphs as transmitted through the example of the Bechers. But I wonder if there is notmore than that here, other aspects which render the picture rather more ambiguous.

In his now classic study Perspective as Symbolic Form, Erwin Panofsky stated: “Exactperspectival construction is a systematic abstraction from the structure of this psychophy-siological space” (the space in which we live and which we understand both through themovement of our body and the workings of our eyes and brain). After enumerating theways in which this is so, he concluded, “there is a fundamental discrepancy between ‘reality’and its [perspectival] construction. This is also true, of course, for the entirely analogousoperation of the camera” (30–31).

The perspectival structure exploited by Struth is indeed endemic to that one-eyedmachine, the camera, but of course, as both theory and practice, it goes back to theRenaissance. A picture such as The Ideal City by Fra Carnevale, from the early 1480sand now in the Walters Arts Gallery, Baltimore, might be taken as an exemplar of this

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way of composing an image (Figure 3).8 Though we should add the proviso that fewRenaissance and post-Renaissance painters used perspective in such a strictly symme-trical and centrally organised manner.9

Likewise, use of a fully centralised and symmetrical perspective has been rare inactual photographic practice. Eugène Atget, for example, often used his large camerato create dramatic vistas looking down the streets, quais and passages of Paris, yet,scanning through all these pictures, Atget’s typical position is nearly always asymme-trical, either just on or off one of the pavements, so that the kerbstones come out ofthe bottom edge of the frame and recede away from the camera (Figure 4).

Struth’s early photographs are in fact very unusual in the rigour with which theyutilise one-point perspective as a sort of doubled cone of visibility. The camera iscentred looking down the street, so that the symmetrical rows of buildings on eitherside recede away from it, zooming in to meet at the vanishing point beyond the end ofthe street (though, in the case of Clinton Road, the perspective runs abruptly into thescrubby undergrowth next to the railway line). That far point sits in symmetricalopposition to the camera, and, as Norman Bryson noted, it is a “position I can neveroccupy, and whose vista I can only imagine by reversing my own, by inverting theperspective before me, and by imagining my own gaze as the new, palindromic pointof disappearance on the horizon” (Vision and Painting 106).

Much has been written about the physical, psychological and indeed philosophicalramifications of a perspectival picturing of the world (see also Damisch; Elkins; Kemp).As described by Martin Jay, the gaze in such a picture was “static, unblinking, fixated . . .producing a visual take that was eternalized, reduced to one ‘point of view’, anddisembodied” (7). It is also abstracted, cold, unemotional, and implicitly invested withpower over what it sees. Jay coined the term “Cartesian perspectivalism” to bringtogether the physical properties of perspective with what Anne Friedberg described as“the metaphysical position of the Cartesian subject: centred and stable, autonomous andthinking, standing outside of the world” (47).

Struth’s photograph of Clinton Road certainly fits the bill in terms of visualcomposition; indeed, the regular repetition of the house fronts as they move awayfrom us act like the depth intervals in diagrammatic representations of classic

Fig. 3 Fra Carnevale, The Ideal City, ca 1480–84, oil and tempera on panel, 77.4 × 220 cm. Collection of the Walters

Art Gallery, Baltimore.

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perspective, emphasising the progression of the lines of roof tops and kerbstonestowards the vanishing point. This also connects with the odd feeling that the streetis like a stage set, somewhat unreal and removed, as if there is something wrong in itbeing quite so symmetrical and quite so regular.10

I wonder in fact if the relentless perspectival plunge of Clinton Road is not almosttoo excessive and produces not certainty and power, but anxiety and disorientation. Inthe paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and the surrealist artists who followed him, anexaggerated perspective was also used to undermine certainty and induce anxiety.Admittedly, de Chirico did this by throwing his perspectival lines away from anyrational vanishing point, indeed by sometimes having several vanishing points at once.(As William Rubin remarked, “Renaissance perspective projects a space that is secureand eminently traversable. De Chirico’s tilted grounds, on the contrary, produce aspace that, when not positively obstructed, is shallow and vertiginous” (58).) But is notthe strict and excessively exact adherence to central one-point perspective just as(perhaps more) disorientating? For, of course, this is not the way we are used toexperiencing the street. As Panofsky noted, there is a fundamental dissonance betweenthe artifice of perspective — locked-in, centrally focused — and the embodied way weperceive and move through the world. We do not habitually stand in the middle ofeven such a quiet street as Clinton Road, but walk along the pavement and experience

Fig. 4 Eugène Atget, Rue Clovis, Paris, 1899–1900, albumen silver print, 21.9 × 17.8 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum,

Los Angeles.

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the street obliquely (this obliqueness is one of the things that makes us feel that we caninhabit Atget’s pictures so naturally).

This discussion of perspective and its reduction to diagrammatic form might bringsomething else to mind, a use of these forms to an altogether different purpose. Itcould be instructive to push this connection a little more, even if we end up in a cul-de-sac and have to retreat. In 1964, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan gave aseries of seminars, later published as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, inone of which he utilised a set of three diagrams to develop his argument (91)(Figure 5).

As Hal Foster noted,

The first cone is familiar from Renaissance treatises on perspective: the subject isaddressed as the master of the object arrayed and focused as an image for him orher positioned at a geometral point of viewing [that is, where the camera /eyestands in a classic diagram of one-point perspective]. (139)

However, Lacan then reversed the trajectory in much the same way as we saw Brysondo, but using a different order of terminology. Where the “object” had been was nowthe “point of light”, at the apex of a cone leading to the “picture”, which is where the“geometral point”, the viewer, is positioned. Later, in the next seminar “What is aPicture?”, Lacan added a third diagram which superimposed the two cones as happen-ing simultaneously, and replaced the “point of light” at the left with “the gaze”. As welook at the world, it gazes back at us.

This is a notoriously difficult and slippery concept and has been interpreted inmany different ways. But what Lacan did not mean by “the gaze” was a look that camefrom other people. Several writers have contrasted Lacan’s position with that of Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness, where Sartre described the way one’s sense ofpossession in looking at something may be disturbed by the entry of someone elselooking at us, thus turning us into the object of le regard rather than its originator(Silverman 164–7; Bryson “The Gaze” 87–108). But, as Kaja Silverman noted,

Fig. 5 Diagrams from Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, first published 1973;

English translation 1994.

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Although he [Lacan] defines it [the gaze] at one point as “the presence of others assuch”, he so relentlessly deanthropomorphizes it as to associate it in one passagewith the “pulsatile, dazzling and spread out function” of light, and in anotherpassage with the “function of seeingness”. (168)11

As Lacan himself remarked, “the gaze is the instrument through which light isembodied and through which . . . I am photo-graphed” (106).

We have obviously moved a long way from Thomas Struth’s photograph ofClinton Road, but what if we tried to map some of these ideas onto it? That just aswe have at this end the camera’s view zooming towards the vanishing point in thedistance, so we have another gaze bouncing back toward the camera, the photographerand, by implication, the viewer. It is probably rather hard to think of that bank ofscrubby bush above the wall at the end of the road as embodying a dazzling “point oflight”, but (to return to Sartre) one could certainly imagine that the bushes containedanother human figure, hidden there like the observer in the park in Blow-Up. Perhapsthere is even another camera there, looking back at us as we look straight down themiddle of the road at it. And, if the sun did suddenly come out (admittedly an unlikelyoccurrence on this grey day), we might catch a glint of light off its lens that wouldsuddenly destabilise our own position and make us less certain, less secure in ourpossession of this place.

Some commentators have sought to actualise Lacan’s abstraction by thinking of thegaze as coming from objects in the world — that it is things that look at us, not“points of light”. This makes more immediate sense (though, to theoretical purists, itprobably seems a little too literal). Slavoj Žižek, for example, moved from a generaldiscussion of the Lacanian “gaze” to a specific analysis of how Alfred Hitchcock wouldshoot a scene in which a protagonist approaches a mysterious and eerie house. (Themost obvious example is the sequence in Psycho where Lila Crane is walking uptowards the old Bates residence on the hill above the motel.) Comments Žižek, “thesubject sees the house, but what provokes anxiety is the indefinable feeling that thehouse itself is somehow already gazing at her, gazing at her from a point that totallyescapes her view and thus makes her utterly helpless” (126). Margaret Iversonsubsequently developed this argument in discussing Edward Hopper’s painting of asimilar gothic house rising up on the other side of a railway line: “The old house inPsycho and, I would argue, the one in Hopper’s House by the Railroad subject the viewerto an annihilating gaze” (425).

There is of course no “Psycho House” on Clinton Road, nothing so overtly sinister andmenacing, but we have already noticed the black space of that one window with its curtainhitched up. It is not on the central perspective line down the middle of the street and, tolook at it, our gaze has to become decentred, perhaps less confident. But certainly, oncenoticed, it is hard to escape the sensation that we are being watched. But watched by whom(or what)? An embodied viewer, owner of a nifty scooter and putter-up of a flag? Or by thehouse itself, by the black hole of the window? Some Lacanians might want to argue that weare fact being watched by everything on the street, by the weeds, the puddle of water andindeed the dog-shit just as much as by the windows, though a more sceptical reader mightfeel these are unlikely sources for any “point of light”.

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There are other ways in which we might frame a discussion of the street as an“unconscious place”, which we can approach by considering the other quality of this picturewhich we identified earlier: the emptiness of the picture. In the 2012 edition of UnconsciousPlaces, Richard Sennett quoted Struth’s gallerist Marion Goodman as describing one of hisearly Düsseldorf pictures as “an empty stage waiting for public life to begin” (UnconsciousPlaces 55). It is a remark with a history. In the 1920s, the street photographs of EugèneAtget, made, we presume, for recordative purposes, came to be seen by a youngergeneration of photographers as the harbingers of a new approach to documentary, morepoetic and subjective than previously acknowledged.12 One aspect of his work that wasparticularly seized on was the depiction of a city devoid of people (Figure 4).

Among these younger photographers was the surrealist Jacques-André Boiffard inthe images of Paris that he made for André Breton’s 1928 book Nadja, and, half acentury later in 1979, these were described by Annette Michelson thus:

This is the space of daily existence from which the stream of life has beenevacuated, in which movement is cancelled. . . . This is also the space of Atget’sParis. To Walter Benjamin his photographs evoked, in their vacant stillness, thescene of a crime. Let us say, rather, that they project a sense of imminence, ofoccurrences past or still to come. In them time is suspended: we are betweentimes. These streets, squares, boulevards, arcades are cleared for the emergence ofle merveilleux; their emptiness is ecstatic. (Michelson 42, qtd. in Walker 61)

These observations may seem excessive in their relationship to the actual photographsmade by Atget (and certainly would if extended to Struth’s pictures), but they developedout of many of the statements made about Atget soon after his death. Robert Desnos wrotethat Atget’s work “maintains an equilibrium between fact and dream”, Waldemar Georgethat he was “stripping naked this immanent mystery that has for a name: banality” andAlbert Valentin wrote: “Everything has an air of taking place somewhere else, somewherebeyond”. That somewhere else was often the edges of the city, as described by Valentin:“Those dead-end streets in the outlying neighbourhoods, those peripheral streets” (all qtd.in Walker 98–9). Which might in turn remind us of Walter Benjamin’s comment that“Breton and Nadja are the couple who take everything we have experienced . . . ongodforsaken Sunday afternoons in the working class districts of big cities . . . and redeemit in revolutionary experience, if not action” (“Surrealism” 148).

One by one, these comments from 50 years earlier strike a chord as we look atStruth’s Clinton Road. His early pictures have often been linked back to Atget’sexample, in that both “record the buildings and thoroughfares of urban life, but notthe life itself” (Gronert 35). And indeed Peter Schjeldahl made an even more exactconnection, writing that, in a typical Struth photograph,

A structure of meaningfulness, like a pressure in the brain, grows on us. It is not amatter of anything normally “interesting”. The place is merely real. At the sametime, it seems a rebus urgent to be read, as if it secreted evidence of a crime. Wedo not feel necessarily that the photographer knew the secret. He is not toyingwith us. It is rather as if he had a Geiger counter for meaning, whose meterhappened to go crazy at this location. (85)

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This is of course another echo of Benjamin’s famous statement (previouslyreferenced by Michelson) that Atget photographed the city as if it were the scene ofa crime. And again, with Struth as it had been with Atget, the analogy is toomelodramatic. But once made, the connection is hard to shake off and, like Žižek’s“Psycho House”, will haunt my imagined entry into the photograph of Clinton Road.13

There is a single term which I have resisted up to this point for fear of overloading thediscussion: the uncanny. It is a large concept with a long history, a term that is used in bothcomplex theoretical debates and in everyday life (Royle; Kelley). But for many readers, themost significant reference point will be the essay on the subject published by SigmundFreud in 1919 (“The Uncanny”). Much of Freud’s essay is not relevant here, dealing as hedoes with automata and the supernatural. Even readers sympathetic to Freud might find ithard going when he spends the early pages of his text analysing the meanings of the word invarious German dictionaries. But out of that unpromising start there does come anintriguing insight which we might usefully adapt.

Freud is of course not actually considering the “uncanny”. This has been the standardEnglish translation for the German term which Freud is examining: “unheimlich”, literally“un-homely”. He starts by looking at its antithesis, “das heimliche” — the homely— but,as he lists the dictionary definitions of that word, he discovers that the homely in fact startsto slide over into the unhomely: “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in thedirection of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich” (“TheUncanny” 347). As Anthony Vidler neatly summarises: “For Freud, ‘unhomeliness’ wasmore than a simple sense of not belonging; it was the fundamental propensity of thefamiliar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in adream” (The Architectural Uncanny 7). It is very much what the street, the urban environ-ment, does when viewed through a surrealist sensibility. And we might start to feel asimilar sensation creeping up Clinton Road as we stare at its photograph.

We might also extend this to the actuality of lived space. It is important to rememberthat behind those facades on Clinton Road, behind each of those repetitive bay windows,there is an actual home, personal, private, invested (for good or bad) with intenselysubjective emotions. And that, in a terraced street like this, there is but a layer of brickand glass between that inside and the outside, only a thin barrier between the private and thepublic. Struth’s picture can only show us the exterior, the literally unhomely, but it impliesall the lives lived behind the house facades. As Richard Sennett commented of Struth’s earlyimages, “There were no people in these black-and-white photos yet the pictures somehowconveyed that the buildings were full of human histories” (Unconscious Places 51).

While researching this essay, I came across a lecture by the American philosopher StanleyCavell, the title of which excited and intrigued me: “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary”(Cavell). In fact, the subject of the lecture was not directly relevant to this research (hisreference is to the ordinary language philosophy ofWittgenstein and Austin), but still, his titlemade me realise that perhaps what was uncanny about Clinton Road in Struth’s photograph isthat it is precisely not weird or spooky, but rather that it is so very ordinary and unremarkable.(Wemight recall Waldemar George’s remark that Atget was “stripping naked this immanentmystery that has for a name: banality”.)Whether that “uncanny ordinariness”was there in theplace itself or whether it is created by the photograph is something we cannot answer. Butcertainly, there is something in the photographic process— the stopping of time, the silence,

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the unwavering gaze — that makes us pause and feel the uncanniness emanating from thisapparently not-uncanny place.

Anthony Vidler noted,

Freud’s analysis of the sources of the uncanny, however, has always seemedwanting precisely when confronted with terms that imply a non-object baseduncanny — an uncanny generated by space rather than its contents . . . Freudremained singularly impervious to spatial questions and it was left to phenomen-ologists from Minkowski to Binswanger to recognize that space itself might bepsychologically determined and thereby to be read as a symptom, if not aninstrument, of trauma and neurosis. (“A Dark Space” 72)14

The best known of these phenomenologists of space was Gaston Bachelard, who, in his 1958book The Poetics of Space, called for a new branch of psychoanalysis he called “topoanalysis” (8).But Bachelard was most interested in interior domestic space, which he characterised in warmand positive terms: “the unconscious . . . is well and happily housed, in the space of itshappiness” (10). Whereas Eugène Minkowski, alongside a “light space” which is “precise,natural and non-problematic”, also conjured up a “dark space”, where “everything is obscureand mysterious” and one “feels as if in the presence of the unknown” (Lived Time 428–9).

Struth’s space is neither light nor dark, but grey. And, whereas “space” in thisphenomenological usage is usually enclosed in a room, the space that Struth depicts isspecifically external and public, and his camera does not enter the individual spaces behindeach door, each window. But just as those house interiors might be “light” or “dark”depending on the experience of their inhabitants, so might the exterior space. ClintonRoad would have been a very different place for someone who had had a traumaticexperience on the street than for someone who had happily played out there as a child.

Is any of this — the soft city, surrealist urbanism, the Lacanian gaze, dark and lightspaces, the uncanny— actually relevant to a study of Struth’s Clinton Road, London, 1977,or have we been indulging ourselves in an excessive over-reading of a picture whose trueworth and meaning remains elsewhere? After all, in the course of his extensive investiga-tion into the “Architectural Uncanny”, Anthony Vidler commented:

If there is a single premise to be derived from the study of the uncanny in modernculture, it is that there is no such thing as an uncanny architecture, but simplyarchitecture, that, from time to time and for different purposes, is invested withuncanny qualities. (The Architectural Uncanny 12)

This statement on its own (removed from the context of the rest of his book) istoo categorical in separating the hard architectural city and the soft city of theimagination; to repeat the comment by Thomas Struth himself, “architecture and thespace it creates have to be read in relationship to the human body and mentalcondition” (Unconscious Places 51). But Vidler does sound a useful note of caution asto how far one might push a reading of the urban environment or images of it.

So some of the approaches made in the past few pages may have been over-imaginative, though perhaps all the more intriguing for that. Struth’s photograph is ofcourse obdurately factual but these speculations have added to its penumbra. And

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perhaps it is possible to bring all this together through the recollection of anotherphrase from Walter Benjamin when he said of surrealist documentary photography thatit “prepares a salutary alienation between the surrounding world and the human being”(“Brief History of Photography” 185). It is in this “salutary alienation” that we might beable to find some common ground between surrealist dépaysement and the formaldistance of Neue Sachlichkeit, with a tang of Brechtian alienation and Russian formalistostranenie (“making strange”) mixed with some Freudian uncanny. Whichever of thesescreens we read the Clinton Road photograph through, we are pushed away from astrictly realist reading of the picture, so that we feel it as unsettling and somewhatstrange.

Perhaps then it is time to turn from the picture, so insistent, fixed and relentless,and go for a walk out in the fresh air, to visit Clinton Road itself, that actuality withoutwhich Struth could not have made his photograph. But, as we do so, it may be usefulto remember Sigmund Freud’s insistence that one of the triggers of the uncanny was a“compulsion to repeat” (“The Uncanny” 361). I have just experienced this myself withStruth’s Clinton Road photograph, where again and again I have been drawn into thepicture till I don’t know whether what I am thinking is actually there in the image orthere in the street or in the surrounding culture of the “soft city” or is just anoverlayering of my own imaginative projection.

And, now, as I travel to visit Clinton Road for myself, I am in turn aware that thismay also be another sort of repetition: a “return” to this place which I already knowfrom its depiction in Struth’s photograph. When Freud finally visited the Acropolis inAthens, he found himself remarking, “So all this really does exist, just as we learned atschool!” (“A Disturbance of Memory” 241; see also Sugarman 80). Similarly, we mightexclaim, on visiting the Parisian suburb of Meudon, or the industrial town of Halifax,or an adobe church north of Santa Fe: “So this really does exist, just we learned fromKertész or Brandt or Adams!” But what we will return to is not that reality in thepicture but a fresh reality, suddenly three-dimensional, in colour and situated withinthe surrounding environment. And, in that collision between the familiarity of theimage and the unfamiliarity of the place, we might suddenly once more find ourselvesface to face with the uncanny.

Part three: the street

It is not too difficult to get to Clinton Road from Central London: head east on eitherthe District or Hammersmith & City line, get off at Mile End station, and ClintonRoad is just on the other side of the crossroads, to the west of and parallel with GroveRoad (Figure 6).

But before going there, there is a little more research to do, this time on thehistory of the street itself. A few hundred yards west of the Mile End crossroads arethe massive buildings of Queen Mary University and, tucked in behind them onBancroft Road, is the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives. It’s awonderfully evocative if somewhat battered Victorian building, contemporaneous withClinton Road itself, and a treasure-trove of information about the history of the area.

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According to the “Topography of Tower Hamlets”, compiled by the local councilofficer Mike Elliston, Clinton Road was built around 1859 (156). I begin my researchby looking at the first large-scale Ordnance Survey map of the area, produced a decadelater in 1870. It shows the rectangular area between Grove Road to the east, Mile EndRoad to the south, the Regent’s Canal on the west and the railway on the north to be apatchwork of short streets lined with terraced houses and backed by workshops andsmall industrial buildings. Just below the railway, Ashcroft Road cuts in off GroveRoad. (The detail on the 1870 map is wonderful: it even shows the letterbox on thestreet corner.) Clinton Road comes off it to the south, with a pub (the PembertonArms, according to Kelly’s Directory for that year) on the western corner. It is linedby 53 identical houses. At the bottom end, the narrow Lawton Passage cuts back toGrove Road, while the main route jinks west then continues south as Grove Streetdown to Mile End Road. Between there and the canal is a network of two or threeparallel streets—Lawton Road, Jupp Street and Longfellow Road—with behind thema large “Packing Case Manufactory” next to the canal.

Who lived in Clinton Road then? The Bancroft Library also holds a copy of the1871 Census records on microfiche and, for an hour or so, I peer at the screen, tryingto decipher the spidery handwriting of the recording clerk. A few of the houses areoccupied by just one or two people, but most contain large families, up to seven oreight. There also seem to be quite a lot of lodgers. The occupations of the householdheads are at the top end of the respectable working class: some clerks and shopworkers, a builder and a wheelwright, while quite a few are employed on the river,

Fig. 6 Map of area around Clinton Road, c. 2006.

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particularly in the Customs House. Only three women are listed as heads of house-holds, one being a retired schoolmistress, another a dressmaker and the third living on“income from rents”. Finally, the census also gives the birthplaces of the occupants.While many of them are from elsewhere in London, there are a substantial numberwho have moved in from around the country — Somerset, Dorset, Leicester, Durhamand Shrewsbury — while a ships master is Scottish and three of the men in theCustoms Service are Irish.15

By the time of the 1938 edition of the map, there were only a few changes.Perhaps the most important had been the opening of the Mile End UndergroundStation in 1902, which would have made travel to and from the city centre much easierand quicker. More locally, the former Grove Street had been re-named as the southernextension of Clinton Road. Lawton Passage was now called Murdock Cottages. Thepacking case factory had been replaced by a sawmill and, on the corner of LongfellowRoad, there was a Welsh Church.

But the following decade was to be one of traumatic change, with the evidencebest seen on other maps, produced by the London County Council to record bombdamage (Ward 85). The most notorious single event took place at 4.25am on 13 June1944, when the first V1 Flying Bomb to land in London struck the railway bridgegoing over Grove Road. Six people were killed and nine injured. It was probably alittle too far away from Clinton Road to do more than shake the houses and provide adreadful fright. But, during the Blitz, bombs had fallen on Ashcroft Road, where allthe buildings (including the pub) plus three or four houses at the top end of ClintonRoad itself were recorded as “totally destroyed”. Down near Mile End Road there wasanother bomb which demolished half a dozen houses. But the bulk of Clinton Roadwas marked as having suffered “blast damage — not structural” and survived the warwith a few cracks and broken windows.

Some of this would have been repaired and some left derelict after the war. Butthe last map I consulted — from 1995 — drew a dramatic picture of the final changesto this small area of East London. The bottom part of Clinton Road (the part thatstarted off as Grove Street) had been demolished, along with the streets betweenClinton Road and the canal — Jupp Street, Lawton Road and Longfellow Street. Theyhad all been replaced by parkland, connected with Mile End Park, stretching south andnorth beyond the railway line. Only the original section of Clinton Road itself stillstood, 47 houses in two rows, facing each other, on their own.

It is almost time to go and check this out against the present actuality. But there isone final image I find in the Bancroft Library archive, a photograph which bears on ourreading of Struth’s photograph. It was donated to the library by a Mrs Ely in 1982 andprobably taken by her the year before (Figure 7). It shows a sunny day in winter withslushy snow on the ground. The camera is looking obliquely towards the houses on theeastern side of Clinton Road. A man crossing the road is gazing quizzically at thecamera and, like him, we might also wonder why Mrs Ely (if she was indeed thephotographer) is taking this picture. Did she live in one of those houses? The buildingson the far corner of what had been Murdock Cottages have gone (they must have beendemolished between Struth making his photograph in 1977 and this picture in 1981).To the extreme right is a wall of corrugated sheeting, which suggests that the lower

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section of Clinton Road is derelict and awaiting the demolition that will follow at theend of the decade.

But, from our point of view, what is most interesting in this photo is the fact thatit also shows us the spot where Thomas Struth stood to take his photograph and tellsus why he was in no danger of being run over by any car coming down Clinton Road.As the old maps also showed, there was a jink westwards between the two halves ofClinton Road and Struth was able safely to set up his tripod on that little bit ofpavement, in front of the lamp-standard and the corrugated iron fence. What enabledhim to take his picture was a quirk of street planning; the view he obtained may havebeen symmetrical and ordered, but the position he occupied to make it was somewhateccentric.

Walking back from the Bancroft Library to Clinton Road, one passes underneathwhat is now the most striking feature of the area: the Green Bridge, designed by PiersGough as a Millennium Project, which crosses above Mile End Road to connect thetwo parts of the park (Figure 8). From the bridge, one can survey the area, then walkdown the path to Clinton Road itself. When I come to where Struth took his picturefrom, I see that this is still a safe place to set up a tripod, just where the parkland pathends and the street begins (Figure 9). It is this end that is actually now the cul-de-sac(for cars at least); the far end, which seemed closed off in Struth’s picture, has in factalways been the main entrance for Clinton Road and one now has a choice of ways out:left for the park or right to join Grove Road.

So, in detail, what has changed? More cars obviously, and the parking is muchmore controlled, with resident bays along the road itself and double yellow lines round

Fig. 7 Mrs Ely (?), Clinton Road, looking north, showing east side from site of Murdock Gardens, c 1981. © Mrs Ely,

Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives.

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the corners. The building at the far right in Struth’s picture, which, as we saw in MrsEly’s photo, had been demolished by 1981, has now been replaced by a smallallotment, in front of which is a stand of bicycles for hire. The houses are generallyin better physical shape, and — an interesting detail — they all now have little frontgardens defended by walls, fences and gates, where, in Struth’s photograph, there hadbeen a sort of vacant no man’s land which was neither house nor street. (It has beensuggested to me that the houses would have originally had railings, which wereremoved during the war as scrap metal. This seems plausible but I haven’t beenable to verify it.)16

As I stand with camera poised, a resident walks past on his way back from theshops. “Photographing our street?” he asks and I show him the postcard of Struth’sphoto that I had bought at the Barbican. “1970s?” he guesses straightaway, “but not thatdifferent really”. “More affluent now, isn’t it?”, I ask and he says, “Yes and no, aboutfifty-fifty owners and tenants. Some houses have been done up but quite a lot haven’t. . . Well, I’ll get out of the way of your photo”. And he goes off, down the street,and, when I stroll along there a few minutes later, he is up a ladder, painting his frontdoor.

Walking along the street, I notice signs of neighbourliness (a notice in one windowsays “Welcome Friends”) and a wider cultural base than the street would have had in1977 (another sign tells me that “Les Crevards and Ella” live in that house). But a

Fig. 8 Ian Walker, Green Bridge, Mile End Road, London, 2015. © Ian Walker.

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picture of some meerkats attached to a telegraph pole suggest that affluence andopenness might also be accompanied by a certain wariness,17 and, indeed, the numberof alarms and security cameras suggest a heightened sense of protectiveness. In fact, atthe far end of the street by the railway, there are even rather grand formal gates. Idon’t know when they were put there or why, and I can’t imagine when they wouldever be closed, but Clinton Road is now a sort of gated community.

Trains are rattling along the railway at regular intervals, heading in and out ofLiverpool Street. If I carry on walking beyond the far, northern end of Clinton Road,up Grove Road under the railway bridge displaying the blue plaque commemoratingthe Flying Bomb strike, I’ll get to the junction with Roman Road. Over on the far sideis a nondescript patch of grassy parkland, but walk on alongside the park railings, andembedded in the grass halfway up is the outline of a building. This was the site of 193Grove Road which, in the autumn of 1993, was the scene of another event which hasbecome part of East End mythology: the construction of Rachel Whiteread’s House, atemporary public sculpture made by casting the interior space of this terraced house inconcrete, then taking away the external structure to reveal the traces (often verydetailed) of its rooms in the surface (Figure 10).

It is revealing to compare and contrast House with Clinton Road as photographedby Struth. Of course, casting and photography produce very different physical arte-facts: flat and rectangular in one case, three-dimensional and irregular in the other. Butthey share an indexicality — a sense that the thing has been created by the object it isan image of — which makes the work very material, oddly intimate and also some-what eerie. Just as I have suggested that Clinton Road as photographed by Struth has a

Fig. 9 Ian Walker, Clinton Road, London, 2015. © Ian Walker.

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certain “uncanny” presence, so the same concept was frequently invoked by writers onWhiteread’s House (Iverson 426–7; Bird 112–15; Vidler “A Dark Space” 70–22).

Yet the differences are as important. House was just that — a single house on awide street — while Clinton Road was and is a small community, somewhat turned inon itself, where the visual effect lies not in the singularity of any one house but in thegrouping of houses, each on the same pattern. And 193 Grove Road was transformed,rendered into a monument, while Clinton Road remained and remains standing. Housenow exists only as a haunting memory, an outline in the grass, a set of images, butClinton Road passed through the photograph and is still there. Grove Road endured anextended process of demolition: first the rest of the terrace was cleared away like somuch else in the East End, then number 193 was removed from around Whiteread’ssculpture and finally, on 11 January 1994, House itself was demolished. Clinton Road,on the other hand, is a survivor. It has survived the Blitz and slum clearance and urbanrenewal and now it is the centre of a Conservation Area, preserved as a good exampleof Victorian terraced housing.18 Clinton Road will be there for a while yet.

But one other thing has changed, something which makes all London a verydifferent place than it was in 1977. I walked back down to Mile End Road and, beforejumping on the tube, looked in the window of the Estate Agents under the GreenBridge. They had a house on Clinton Road which had recently been sold for £875,000.That was in early 2015 — it would be more now — and it will have long-termimplications, if not for the hard fabric of Clinton Road, then certainly its softer, humanexistence.

Fig. 10 Ian Walker, Rachel Whiteread’s House, London, 1993. © Ian Walker.

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Behind both Rachel Whiteread’s cast of House and Thomas Struth’s photograph ofClinton Road, there lay an unspoken but powerful history. Doreen Massey, writing in1995 about House, eloquently described the East End as

a place of cohabitation of radicalism and racism, as a meeting-place of immigrantsfrom all over the world and over centuries, as a repository of a bit of Englishidentity, as a site of contradiction between a persistent localism and the context ofhaving been for two centuries and more at the hub of a global Empire. (49)

Now, this history is shifting and moving yet again, and one can only wonder whatchanges will happen to this street and the city around it, as the twenty-first centurymoves inexorably forward. Clinton Road now has a triple existence: as a place to belived in, as a heritage artefact to be conserved and, finally, as a photograph. And thatphotograph slices through the history of the street, place and time pinned downprecisely: Clinton Road, London, 1977.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This was also noted by Martin Coomer, reviewing the show for Time Out.2 “Sachlichkeit” is a tricky word to translate into English, one dictionary giving a

range of definitions: “reality, essentiality, objectivity, impartiality, detachment”(qtd. in Arts Council of Great Britain 6). “New Objectivity” has become thestandard translation, but it evidently privileges one element in the originalGerman term.

3 The Barbican catalogue did not list the images in that show, but in the 2002 Dallascatalogue (Thomas Struth 1977–2002 176), the print size of Clinton Road, London,1977 is given as 44 × 56 cm (17 3/8 × 22 ins) in a 66 × 84 cm (26 × 33 ins)frame. That feels the right size for the Barbican picture also.

4 The song was written by the whole group with lyrics by Roger Waters. Thisline incorporates a phrase from Henry David Thoreau: “Most men lead lives ofquiet desperation”, but changes it into a more specific comment on the Englishcharacter.

5 Martin Parr’s best known photograph of a 1977 Jubilee Street party shows thefestivities at Elland in Yorkshire apparently abandoned due to teeming rain(Williams 79). The same day, Parr also photographed a drier party in progressat Todmorden (Parr 68–9).

6 I first saw Struth’s work in the group exhibition Another Objectivity at the ICA,London, in 1988 (Chevrier and Lingwood). As the title indicates, the exhibitionsignalled a turning away from the then fashionable post-modernism. Eighteen ofStruth’s city photographs were exhibited — though not the picture from London— and I remember finding their rigour impressive, but rather leaden compared to

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the work of other topographical photographers such as John Davies or GabrieleBasilico. It took a while to adjust.

7 There is a striking juxtaposition in the catalogue, with the Clinton Road photo-graph, small and grey, placed opposite one of Struth’s large Paradise pictures ofdense jungle foliage (Thomas Struth 1977–2002 24–5).

8 This is one of three panels made by the same studio in Urbino, all depictingsymmetrical perspectival views of “ideal cities”. The best known is in the GalleriaNazionale delle Marche in Urbino and the third panel is in the Gemäldegalerie,Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

9 An interesting example here is the series of paintings of the interiors of seventeenthcentury Dutch churches by Pieter Saenredam. As Svetlana Alpers showed,Saenredam was quite willing, in special circumstances, to use a centralised per-spective looking straight down the church nave, but, in his best known pictures, theviews are “notably asymmetrical”, looking across the church with a complexpattern of columns and arches (52, 64–68).

10 It is worth recalling that the Renaissance paintings of the “Ideal City” are connectedwith actual stage sets of the period; I am reminded here particularly of the steepperspectival streets which Vicenzo Scamozzi designed for the stage of AndreaPalladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza after Palladio’s death in 1582.

11 This is all much complicated by the element in Lacan’s diagrams which I have leftout of this account: the insertion halfway along the cone of the “screen”. Thisconcept has been the subject of many different interpretations, such as that by HalFoster: “Call it the conventions of art, the schemata of representation, the codes ofvisual culture, this screen mediates the object-gaze for the subject, but it also protectsthe subject from this object-gaze. . . . In this way the screen allows the subject, atthe point of the picture, to behold the object, at the point of light. Otherwise itwould be impossible, for to see without this screen would be to be blinded by thegaze or touched by the real” (140).

12 For an account of this process that emphasises the surrealists’ interest in Atget’swork, see Walker (88–113).

13 And, as I enter, I cannot shake the comparison with photographs of a rather similarif shorter terraced street in west London: Rillington Place, where, in the last houseon the left, between 1943 and 1953, John Reginald Christie murdered eightwomen and secreted their bodies beneath the floors and behind the walls.

14 This statement, however, does ignore one section in “The Uncanny” essay in whichFreud famously recounts an experience he himself had in “a provincial town inItaly”, where he gets lost and keeps inadvertently returning to the same street, hisgreat discomfort being keenly observed by the “painted women” in the surroundingwindows (“The Uncanny” 359).

15 Census records are closed for 100 years, so the last census where we can at presentaccess the same level of information as here is 1901. It would be particularlyintriguing to view the records for 1981, the nearest census to when Struth made hisphotograph, to see who actually did live in Clinton Road at that time.

16 This suggestion was made during a discussion after I presented a shorter version ofthis paper at a symposium on “Photographs of London” at Birkbeck College,University of London, on 20 May 2015. My thanks to Patrizia di Bello for invitingme to deliver that paper and to the participants in the lively debate that followed.

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17 Readers outside the UK may be unaware of the logo of the “Neighbourhood Watch”scheme which features a group of meerkats attentively looking out in differentdirections. See the Metropolitan Police website: http://content.met.police.uk/Neighbourhood-Watch/1400011160267/mettrace (accessed 6 November 2016).

18 See http://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/Documents/Planning-and-building-control/Development-control/Conservation-areas/Clinton-RoadV1.pdf (accessed 29October 2016).

Works cited

Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989.Arts Council of Great Britain. Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties. London:

Hayward Gallery, 1979.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1974.Benjamin, Walter. “Brief History of Photography.” Translated by J. A. Underwood. One-

way Street and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 2009. 172–92.Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Latest Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.”

Translated by J. A. Underwood. One-way Street and Other Writings. London: Penguin,2009. 143–60.

Bird, Jon. “‘Dolce Domun’ in Rachel Whiteread.” House. Ed. James Lingwood. London:Phaidon, 1995. 110–24.

Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven, CT: Yale UP,1983.

Bryson, Norman. “The Gaze in the Expanded Field.” Vision and Visuality. Ed. Hal Foster.Seattle, WA: Bay, 1988. 87–108.

Cavell, Stanley. “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary.”In Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1988. 153–78.

Chevrier, Jean-Francois, and James Lingwood, eds. Another Objectivity. London: ICA, 1988.Damisch, Hubert. The Origin of Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995.Elkins, James. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca, IL: Cornell UP, 1994.Elliston, M. F. A Topography of Tower Hamlets c 1700-c 2000, Compiled 2013. Digital

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Ian Walker was, until his retirement in 2013, Professor of the History of Photography at the

University of South Wales. He is now a freelance writer and artist based in London. His main

research has been around Surrealism and Documentary Photography; full details can be

found at his website ‘ianwalkerphoto.com’.

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